The Secret to Writing Well

It's not as hard as you think, it all comes down to understanding.

School Of Athens by Raphael

Hello Everyone,

I would just start by getting one thing straight. I’m not here to tell you the tried-and-true way of writing, I’m not delusional enough to think I have all the answers. If you know someone who does, let me know. In all my time wandering the earth I’ve come to live by the mentality that we are all students and will forever be one. We never stop learning and growing. There will always be something that I don’t know and have to learn. I thought Socrates was being fake humble when he said he knew that he knew nothing, but he was really on to something. He was able to approach things with a blank slate.

So, I channeled my inner Socrates as I was getting frustrated at my computer with every word I wrote. All I wanted to do was write a fantastic world and characters, but my words were just flat. I could see it in front of my face, it was infuriating. I contemplated bargaining with my soul to the gods to gain ultimate writing abilities, but I have read Neil Gaiman and dealing with the muses doesn’t end well. I scratched that plan and went to google with the Socrates mindset of I know nothing, so I wanted to start at square one. Because all I want to do is write well. It seems like a simple request, but it wasn’t. All google came up with were things to do, not concepts to understand.

Like writing every day, using correct grammar and just a bunch of exercises. When learning something you can’t just slap down a worksheet and expect the student to do it and understand it. I was the kid who always asked a thousand questions, I needed to know why the heck x turned into y. Knowing something is one thing but understanding it is another. I feel like the teaching of the writing concepts are being gate kept. I thought this was a new thing but then I found this quote from Ernest Hemingway:

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

Hemingway is summoning us to a mentality that stops writers from learning how to write well. It’s true Hemingway does recognize that writing is a learning process, but that process should be shared. Good things are meant to be…